News

Well, it’s that time again, folks! Time to miss a deadline and explain what asshole body part we have to blame for it!

Yes, I’ve had to put Hug Your Local Werewolf—my story of a queer boy who’s lycanthropically challenged—on pause for a little while. Fittingly, my Patrons got first-access to this explainer, but I figured all you faceless beauties on my analytics feed deserved a rundown as well.

Buckle up, kids, this gets hairy.

Excuse 1: My Mirena Ran out of Juice

Anyone who’s experienced the Mirena Crash personally probably just clutched their pearls and their pelvis at the same time. It’s… not a fun experience.

I’ve had depression on and off for as long as I can remember but my usual symptoms are predominantly executive function related. I know I’m getting bad again when it takes the Cretaceous period to switch tasks.

This was not that. This was much darker and a lot more dangerous. Once I worked out what was happening I booked myself into my Psych for a meds change and my Gyno to have my Mirena replaced.

My gyno recommended putting me under general anaesthetic to swap the little bastard out to try and mitigate flaring up my chronic pain again. Which leads me to:

Excuse 2: I Had a Bad Reaction to the Anaesthetic

Three days after my Mirena swap I called an ambulance and spent three hours in the emergency room because I thought my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I couldn’t focus, I’d forget what I was doing as I was doing it, and nothing felt real.

After a barrage of tests to ensure my heart was working and my blood looking like blood should I was told nothing was wrong and sent home. There, I spent ten minutes googling my symptoms. And then I called my psychiatrist.

I was experiencing severe depersonalisation. A fun form of dissociation that makes you feel like your consciousness has been swapped out for that of an alien. When you’re not feeling like a fake intruder in your own life you’re wondering what even IS reality and wow, food feels weird in your stomach, maybe you should do something drastic to get it out because nothing’s real anyway so-

It was not fun. Which is probably the understatement of the millennia.

I’m mostly out of the woods now. I still have bouts of being a space cadet but I’m hoping even those will fuck off with time.

Fun fact: this is a not-uncommon side effect experienced by those who receive Ketamine as an anaesthetic. I’ve since heard back from my anaesthetist who gave me a list of the drugs he used and Ketamine wasn’t on it. So. We have no idea what set me off or how to keep it from happening again.

FUN.

Excuse 3: Money

Ah yes. That ol’ chestnut.

So the two points above ate roughly a month of my life. In that month, my freelancing took a nose dive. I also got hit with my $500 health insurance excess and (unrelated but) a $500 vet bill.

My cat is doing better but she’s 17 so let’s just say my bank balance hasn’t seen the last of her.

All this has put me in an even more financially cruddy situation. And like, it was already pretty cruddy, my dudes.

Hug Your Local Werewolf, like most of my projects, doesn’t cost me anything but time to write. Even the cover art I can pull together myself. I do, however, want to get it professionally edited and sensitivity read.

The sensitivity reading, in particular, is something I can’t budge on. My protagonist is African American, and as a white Australian, I want to make sure I’m doing everything in my power to represent Eli responsibly. That means paying someone to help me do that.

I’d planned to just wear the cost of all this and (hopefully) recoup most of the expense through my Patreon once my writing got more interest. But the last month has set me back… a lot. I’m going to have to focus on work I can produce with little overhead until I get my financial feet back under me.

Where to From Here?

I’m still going to be writing, I’m just going to be focusing on some other projects. I want to get a few more queer twisted fairytales under my belt so I can go about releasing an anthology. I also have a couple of novellas I want to bang out and look at selling to try and get some passive income coming in on that front.

To my Patrons, thank you guys so much for sticking with me through all this. I was ready to lose a couple of you when I broke this news but you’ve all been Golden Retriever levels of loyal and I love you for it. You’ll continue to get access to my sporadic short stories and (once I have something publishable) will get free copies of those eBooks. I’m also going to ramp up my prompt fills and introduce some (mostly) Patreon exclusive flash fiction.

To everyone else, thanks for your understanding with this. Once I’m in a position to release Hug Your Local Werewolf properly, you can bet I’ll be screaming it from the high heavens. If you’d like to keep up to date on my work I’m on Twitter here.